11 October 2017

Rebecca Harding talks to UK statistics regulator Ed Humpherson

Ed Humpherson is the Director General of the Office of Statistics Regulation. This podcast focuses on the centrality of high quality statistics and big data to central government administration. Ed sets and enforces the standards for the statistics that are published by the government about “all human life” in the UK, from trade and economics through to health, crime and society. His passion is the data that “is going to be the way we view the world in the future” and his drive is to ensure that he is part of the process of ensuring that data is of the highest quality.

He is in the process of reviewing the data Code of Practice – which is the central governance of how data is collected, managed and interrogated across government. There are two forces driving the need to update the Code which was first established in 2008. He argues that the abundance of data now makes people sceptical about its use and interpretation in the “post-truth” world we live in. His work is about addressing the core challenge that there is “data data everywhere, but no-one is really sure what to believe.”